Quotes about Legalism

Legalism lowers, rather than raises, God's standards. Loving your neighbor as yourself, caring for the poor, bringing about justice, forgiving enemies—none of these reduces to a set of rules. Indeed, any list of rules narrows the breadth of what God wants done in the world. It moves the emphasis away from dispensing God's grace to sinners toward a pointless competition with pseudo-saints. It makes faith petty and irrelevant, not something that urgently matters.

Legalism is a subtle danger because no one thinks of himself as a legalist.

Legalism may "work" in an institution such as a Bible college or the Marine Corps. In a world of ungrace, structured shame has considerable power. But there is a cost, an incalculable cost: ungrace does not work in a relationship with God. I have come to see legalism in its pursuit of false purity as an elaborate scheme of grace avoidance. You can know the law by heart without knowing the heart of it

Legalism is a subtle danger because no one thinks of himself as a legalist. My own rules seem necessary; other people's rules seem excessively strict.

The difference is one of motivation: legalism is self-centered; discipline is God-centered. The legalistic heart says, "I will do this thing to gain merit with God." The disciplined heart says, "I will do this thing because I love God and want to please Him.

If we confuse legalism and discipline, we do so to our soul's peril.

The knowledge of God's Word without love is a destructive force because it puffs us up with pride and legalism (1 Cor. 8:1-3). This causes us to justify ourselves rather than repent of the unforgiveness.

Have you ever wondered what a church full of Pharisees would be like? 1. They would all attend every service 2. They would all tithe 3. They would all work in the church 4. They would all go to hell.

The ironic thing about legalism is that it not only doesn't make people work harder, it makes them give up. Moralism doesn't produce morality; rather, it produces immorality.

Legalism is not just a reduction of the gospel, it is another gospel altogether (see Galatians), where salvation is earned by keeping the rules we have established.

Legalists and theological experts with "lips close to God and hearts far away from him" (Isa. 29:13). The world hardly needs more of these.

The Beatitudes simply cannot be "good news" if they are understood as a set of "how-tos" for achieving blessedness. They would then only amount to a new legalism. They would not serve to throw open the kingdom—anything but. They would impose a new brand of Phariseeism, a new way of closing the door—as well as some very gratifying new possibilities for the human engineering of righteousness.